Thom Yorke tells NME how ill OK Computer left him

Thom Yorke says he was really ill once OK Computer was finished, after years of heading one way without being able to stop or connect with anything, in an interview NME runs in full next week. Basically becoming unhinged, in the best sense of the word. Completely unhinged.¹

I think by now I’m supposed to have fucked myself up permanently or be dead.

Thom Yorke¹

Instead he says the whole band came out of it dislocated, in different ways and to different degrees, after living one way for so long, and that they have found their balance again. He only began to go easier on himself once Kid A, out on 2 October, was finished. All through making it he thought the record might never happen, and in the end he got the sounds out of his head and onto tape.

Asked about talk that the album is a piss-take, Yorke says he always knew it would be a product. I always wanted whatever I did to end up in the high street, no matter what it was, because to me, there isn’t anywhere else to go.¹ What worries him is that people will think he simply decided everything had to go electronic, which was never the point.

Yorke backs Jubilee 2000, the debt-relief campaign the band have promoted on radiohead.com, as the acceptable, mainstream end of the fight against the IMF and the World Bank. He was at this year's May Day protests in London, which he calls pretty nasty affairs, but he wants the two institutions made unpopular enough to be dismantled, by whatever means. I don’t really care how it happens, as long as it happens.¹